In Liberec, a four-seater cable car to Ještěd will be built later this year

LIBEREC - A new four-seat chairlift will serve skiers in Liberec this winter. It will likely be financed by a private company, which will be selected by the city's Ještěd Sports Area (SAJ) from the interested applicants by the end of October. The city council of Liberec entrusted this task to choose the most suitable partner today.
The chairlift will cost nearly 80 million crowns. "However, it seems that we could find partners willing to invest a total of 150 to 200 million crowns into the winter resort at Ještěd," said Pavel Krenk, the deputy mayor and chairman of the SAJ board, to ČTK. Preparatory work for building the four-seat chairlift is nearly complete, and construction will begin next week.
The winning company, according to Krenk, may receive the Ještěd recreational center for lease in return for building the lift. "However, everything depends on mutual agreement. I can also imagine that our partner would receive a percentage of the revenue from the lift," he stated.
A serious candidate for who will finance the construction of the lift and possibly become the operator of the Ještěd sports area is the company Snowhill. They operate in ski resorts in the Krkonoš Mountains, such as in Vysoké nad Jizerou and Herlíkovice. The lift will likely be built by the end of November by a consortium of companies Stavby silnic a železnic and Doppelmayr, which won the tender announced by the city hall. The lift will run over the artificially snowed expanded slope from the road to the Ještědka hut up to the bottom station of the Českých drah gondola lift.
The new four-seat chairlift will transport around 2000 passengers per hour above the slopes. Thanks to it, the overall hourly capacity of transported skiers in the Ještěd winter resort will increase from the current 3500 to 5500. Until now, skiers under Ještěd only used a two-seat lift and drag lifts. However, last winter season, long lines were formed during peak times, with waits of up to 45 minutes.
Both SAJ and the city are trying to obtain a grant from the European Union for the modernization of the ski resort under Ještěd. So far, they have not received it, and the city did not find enough funds in its own budget for the lift. Therefore, SAJ is now seeking a private investor. Cooperation with them would not end even if funding from the Union were to arrive in Liberec after all.